The PSOE considers calling Almeida to the congressional mask investigation commission
Socialist sources have affirmed this Wednesday that the party is studying that the mayor of Madrid, José Luis Martínez Almeida, appears in the investigative commission of the Congress of Deputies on the thousands of emergency contracts that “all administrations” signed during the dramatic pandemic stage that Spain suffered in the first half of 2020. The PP yesterday opposed the creation of this commission.
“We are once again seeing how the PP adopts, once again, the law of the funnel. We heard José Luis Martínez Almeida, mayor of Madrid, shamelessly ask for the resignation of Francina Armengol, president of Congress: Was hers a scam? The mayor seems to have forgotten that Justice has put commission agents Luis Medina and Alberto Luceño on trial, for whom up to 15 years are requested, for committing an alleged scam against the City Council. It was Almeida’s cousin who proposed his name to the City Council, as he acknowledged in court,” PSOE sources explain.
On March 20, 2020, the Madrid City Council received an offer of different protective material from Luis Medina and Alberto Luceño, intermediaries with no experience in that sector. Medina offered the material to the Madrid City Council through a relative of the mayor, José Luis Martínez Almeida, according to the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, and ended up selling it for almost 16 million dollars that the City Council had to advance. “Luceño and Medina inflated the prices of masks by up to 60%. They did the same with the gloves (81%) or the tests (71%),” complain socialist sources, who argue that the Balearic Islands Government chaired by Francina Armengol – the PP has been demanding her resignation for days – paid in 2020 3, 7 million for the masks, which were also not of sufficient quality for health professionals, but for citizens.
“We believe that Almeida’s experience can shed light on the mode of operation of many commission agents who acted during the pandemic, taking advantage of the suffering of the entire country, and like any administration can be a victim without the need to incur collusion or any crime,” say the socialist sources.
The Madrid City Council, unlike what it did with another mask scam perpetrated by a New York consulting firm that it denounced in court, did not launch any claim file against Luceño and Medina after receiving merchandise of inferior quality to the committed one. The person who uncovers the scam against the Madrid City Council is the Money Laundering Service of the Bank of Spain through a report that reaches the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office on July 23, 2020, “revealing facts that could constitute, without prejudice to further classification , a crime of embezzlement of public funds and a crime of money laundering.”
In the case of the Balearic Islands, the regional Executive chaired by Armengol bought masks in 2020 from the company involved in the plot of the Koldo case —the alleged corruption network concocted to obtain public contracts for the supply of masks in the worst of the pandemic in exchange for the payment of allegedly illegal commissions—, investigated their quality and verified that it was inferior to that promised, but did not order until three years later the return of 2.6 million euros, which threatens to expire with the new PP Government.